They Are Rare

The heroic tale of spending 3 weeks documenting your microservice architecture in Confluence with 47 diagrams and 12,000 words, only to discover your teammates haven't even clicked the link. Documentation in the wild: simultaneously essential and completely ignored. The digital equivalent of shouting architecture patterns into the void while your colleagues continue deploying to production with comments like "// will fix later" and "// don't touch this or everything breaks".

The glossy corporate brochure vs. the employee handbook they don't print. That "global team" really means "you'll be on Zoom at 3 AM explaining to people 12 timezones away why your code broke production while the VP who insisted on the deadline sleeps peacefully." The smile in the first panel is the same one you'll practice in the bathroom mirror before each all-hands meeting where they announce another "exciting global collaboration opportunity."

The perfect excuse has finally arrived in the AI era. Just tell your manager "my code's generating" while Claude or GPT does the heavy lifting, and suddenly you're not scrolling Reddit—you're "waiting for computational processes to complete." Works every time. The best part? When the code finally arrives, you can just claim you wrote it and collect those sweet, sweet productivity points. Modern problems require modern solutions.

THE ABSOLUTE PANIC IN THAT JUNIOR DEV'S EYES! 😱 Nothing says "I'm completely unprepared for this responsibility" like being handed an intern when you're still trying to figure out where the bathroom is! It's the corporate version of asking someone who can barely swim to teach swimming lessons. The absolute AUDACITY of management to create this chain of blind leading the blinder while every competent developer is sipping margaritas on a beach somewhere. That poor intern is about to learn programming through the ancient technique of "frantically Googling together" - the unofficial bootcamp of tech companies everywhere!

The elegant architecture you craft in your head vs the janky spaghetti code that actually makes it to production. Every developer swears they're Jack Sparrow when designing their solution, but when the deadline pressure hits, we all turn into the bootleg knockoff version. After 15 years in this industry, I've accepted that my mental models are just elaborate lies I tell myself before the reality of git commits sets in. The expectation vs reality gap in programming is wider than the ocean Captain Jack sails on.

The eternal dance between management and developers plays out like a tragic romance. Management swoops in with urgent demands: "I NEED YOU TO FIX THIS BUG RIGHT NOW" – because apparently every bug is production-crashing, revenue-bleeding, CEO-angering emergency. Meanwhile, the developer, who's been around this block before, responds with the question that sends shivers down management's spine: "YOU CREATED A TICKET RIGHT?" That awkward silence that follows? That's the sound of proper workflow processes dying a quiet death. No ticket = no bug in management's universe, until it becomes convenient to remember again during your performance review.